As
you can see on our benchmarks, the first obvious thing is that the Celeron
1.2GHz now manage to equal the Tualatin 1.2GHz CPU apart for a few specific
tests that rely on the 133 MHz bus offered by the Pentium III. The Pentium
III 1.2GHz gets honors since it manages to approach, most of the time the
results of a Pentium 4 1.7GHz. Logically the Pentium 4 2 GHz is the most
powerful processor, with results that speak by themselves, surpassing every
other platform. It’s a fact the Pentium 4 2GHz blows away every other CPU.
But it’s clear that the 800 MHz advantage it has over the Pentium III 1.2GHz
or other AMD solutions should have put the Pentium 4 2GHz way ahead of its
competitors. This is all due to the limited cache memory and to the
oversized pipeline.

Not to say that if most of actual benchmarking tools now take into play the
specific Pentium 4 intrinsic characteristics, they’re not focused enough on
what the Pentium 4 does the best: multimedia. Indeed while the Pentium III
platform is an all-terrain one defining the middle of today’s computing
road, the Pentium 4 has been designed for high demanding multimedia
applications and 3D games. The best evidence is the excellent results the
Pentium 4 achieved in Quake III Arena. The Pentium 4 is the ultimate
solution to enjoy high speed treating times when using high end multimedia
applications that code into MPEG 2, rip into WMA or MP3, mount videos, add
special effects to videos, etc.